Japan-based international online magazine features creative culture

REFIK ANADOL “LATENT HISTORY”

First impression when you walk into the exhibition room – a 390 square meters hall with the walls entirely covered by Anadol’s work, which is triggered by 8 projectors in the watch-out-system – is a rather impressive one, there is the sense of being embraced by his art. Furthermore, the effect of all-in-synch screens makes the room move like an elevator upwards and downwards. This work blurs boundaries between architecture, photography, and technology, creating a new universe never existing otherwise.

Photo: Victor Moreno

Nevertheless, Anadol’s research work focuses on the reaction of each pixel to the algorithmic washing machine he creates, letting that to delve into some surprising result that combines art with the use of technology. Those results, he calls them “Frame-Predicted Hallucinations”. He plays with memory, the images, which in this case, by using historical images from the city of Stockholm, he creates a new vision of the city. “These machine-hallucinated images come to represent the collective memory, hidden layers of history, and the conciseness of a city that otherwise might remain unseen,” Anadol explains.

Photo: Victor Moreno

There does come a time, however, when the significance of the natural is so dismissed than difference between natural and artificial is becoming less and less. Many different writers, scholars, artists, film directors, and such have researched about this relationship between what is natural and what is artificial, a work which many of them ended up believing more sooner than later humankind won’t be able to find the difference between both. As a matter of fact, I read that Anadol is huge fan of Blade Runner “That movie changed my life,” he assures.